"Why should I? And I certainly can't imagine fighting Lucius."
"You will have to do one or the other," said Sebastian, placidly,
"But the winning side is always hard to tell."
"Not this time," said Andrew, feeling his tongue grow curiously
bitter, "If there really is a revolt, they'll put it down as they put
down the Pretender at Culloden. Butcher Cumberland. They have a
trained army. We have nothing. I mean the Colonials have nothing,"
he added hastily.
"God sometimes gets tired of the man on the ass," said Sebastian, "If
I didn't think that, I would strangle myself here with my own hands."
"Perhaps," said Andrew, considering, "But if I were betting, I should
bet on the man."
"You have already bet on the ass, my friend," said Sebastian, with a
chuckle, "If you had not, you would not be here."
His shoulder was withdrawn from beneath Andrew's hand. He turned
over on his side. "I have some letters from home," muttered Andrew,
"I can tell better when I read them--is there ever any light in this
place, Sebastian?"
"A little, in the morning. I remember when we first made this
cellar, I wondered why it was dug so deep." He was silent. Andrew
heard him begin to breathe deeply and quietly.
"What's the matter, Sebastian--are you going to sleep?"
"Why not?" said a drowsy voice, "I may dream my knife did not slip
after all."
"I wonder if my head will come off, if I try to sleep," said Andrew
to himself. "I suppose it won't, though it feels like it." He
stretched himself out on the straw and shut his eyes. "But listen,
Sebastian," he said, after a long pause, "Do you really believe God
is here in prison with us, in this room?" He waited, but there was
no answer. Then he sighed and arranged himself a little more
comfortably, hoping the things that ran would not scamper over him
much, once he was quiet. In the morning, they could plan,
perhaps--not now--the thick stupor of fatigue rocked him in a cradle
of lead. It seemed odd that the dawn which would wash the tiny
window above him with pale waters of light tomorrow was the very same
colored dawn that should have found him dozing in Sparta Gentian's
bed, with her hair spread over their pillow like a scarf of drawn
gold.
3.
As Sebastian had said, light came to their habitation in the
morning--a slanting, shallow column, but enough to enable Andrew to
read his letters. Also they had been given fresh water and a dish of
boiled rice. The corporal had brought them these, but had refused to
answer any questions. Andrew had asked for a razor, which was, of
course, denied.
"I never saw them hang a fellow with a beard," the corporal remarked
judicially after the request, "But then I haven't seen much hanging."
His mouth was sad. "When they hung the great pirates at Execution
Dock I was as near to it as could be, but somebody had to stay with
Gramfer. Crippled all up he was, and twice he'd fallen in the fire
with nobody by. Well, I was the youngest and the least account, so I
didn't see it. They say Kidd made a fine show. My father saw him,"
he added, with some pride. "Twirled he did and kicked for a while.
Well, 'tis all in the drop, they say--a proper drop and 'tis over as
soon as bite your nails," he concluded cheerfully and disappeared.
Andrew could not hate the man for his graveyard remarks--his face was
as honest and foolish as the face of a giant pumpkin. But he felt
his neck tenderly for a moment after the fellow had gone.
Now Sebastian was finishing the boiled rice, and he was reading the
last of his letters. From them he got anxiety and excitement but
little solace. Lexington--Concord--he tried to remember
Lexington--he had passed through it once on a memorable trip to
Boston with his father and Lucius. He remembered the leathery smell
of the coach and how his father had gone to sleep with a red silk
handkerchief over his face distinctly enough, but Lexington itself
eluded him. A blur of trees--a village green where a goose waddled
and stretched out its neck to hiss at a pinafored little girl--a
white church with a steeple--the open door of a blacksmith shop where
a man in a leather apron spat upon a fiery horseshoe--these scraps
were all he could dredge up from the ragbag of memory. He stitched
them into a town, in no way different from a dozen other little
Massachusetts towns through which their coach had rolled, and yet
now, somehow, very different. A month ago, when morning was only
half-awake and the shadows lay the wrong way, men had died on that
dim grass, awkwardly, unexpectedly--the brimstone smell of burnt
powder had drifted in through the windows of the white church and the
open door of the smithy--where the goose had waddled the green,
bullets had journeyed as casually, with much the same hissing sound.
He saw a plump woman with a queer white face stand at the foot of a
stairway, listening, and his brother, the macaroni with two watches,
dandy no longer but dirty and smooched, with a cut on his cheek,
hiding behind a wall to fire at broken red dots running over a
bridge. And still he could not comprehend.
"Disperse ye Rebels says He but we were Not for Dispersing ... So, as
I say, We Chast them till they met with their Other Force ... Lord
Percy's, it is Said ... I have a Fine Blister on Both my Feet because
of it and a better prospect of Hanging than Ever I had but oh Andrew
you should have Seen the Sweet Way they Ran..."
That was Lucius' letter. So no more at Present from Yr. Bro. It was
odd to think of Lucius, the correct, the mannered, helping
Massachusetts bumpkins to hunt a lord like a fox.
One thing, however, stood out plainly. His father was a broken man.
Suspected by both sides, the invisible swordsman had forced him to
the wall at last. The handwriting in his last epistle was shaky and
old--the ends of the letters trailed off feebly as if it had been too
great a care to finish them aright. "I have had a Stroke, my dear
Sonn, and though they say 'Twas not the True Apoplexy, yr. Mother is
greatly Concerned." Andrew felt pain tear at his heart, ragged and
sharp. Pain and satire, for the words were followed by a formal
blessing "Upon your Projected Marriage." For an instant Andrew
wished, humanly enough, that he had never found Sparta out. His
father seemed to set such store by the fact that his younger son, at
least, was safe from the worries that beset himself. The mood was
succeeded by one quite as youthful though more practical. He started
up. He must get back to New York at once--see his father--find out
the truth of the quarrel between colonies and King. His head was
better now and his fever, queerly enough, quite gone. He was almost
at the door before he remembered. Then he put his head in his hands
and groaned aloud.
He felt Sebastian touch him on the arm. "Come my friend," said a
voice, "Sorrow eases the heart, but we have no time for it now.
There must be a way out of this hole--the rats come in and go out,
and between us we have at least as much sagacity as a rat."
It was later. The slanting column of light through the window had
almost disappeared. They had searched the boundaries of their
prison, floor and walls, as far as their hands could reach, like
misers looking for a penny, and still they had found nothing to aid
their escape. Two crannies through which rats could pass, a litter
of soiled straw tossed over and over--that was all. Andrew thought
of the tools hanging from the bench of the carpenter's shop by the
wharf with a hopeless longing. He would have given any dubious
immortality for the little file down by the end.
"We must think of some way to get the soldier in here and knock him
on the head," said Sebastian, rising from his knees after a last
picking over of the straw. "We cannot take the wall apart with our
fingernails."
"Even if we did, though..." said Andrew.
"Yes," said Sebastian, "There's only one way out and that's through
the guardroom. But it is our only chance."
"Wait a minute," said Andrew. He took up the dish and the pitcher
that had held their breakfast and stared at them with greedy
searching eyes.
"I thought of that," said Sebastian. He tapped the dish, "Wood," the
pitcher, "Clay." "Even if we broke the pitcher, the pieces would
crumble on the stone."
"There must be something, somewhere," said Andrew, against reason.
Again his eyes slowly traversed the familiar walls of the room from
ceiling to floor. Then he stiffened all over like a dog coming to
point. High up in the wall and hardly visible in the gloom, beyond
the reach of their hands, was a large, projecting nail.
"Get up on my shoulders, Sebastian--there is our tool," he said, his
voice shaken as if he had just risen from deep water with a sea-pearl
in his hand.
It took an hour or so to work the nail loose from the wall. When
they had it down at last, it proved bent and rusty but they gloated
over it with a solemn joy.
"Now," said Sebastian, practically, "Where?" and he looked around him.
"We could never tunnel through from below in time," said Andrew.
"That stone beneath the window--can you reach it, if you stand on my
shoulders again?"
"I can just reach up to the middle of the bar," said Sebastian, after
he had tried.
"Sentry outside?"
Sebastian peered cautiously, "I don't see one. But there may be one.
There's a ditch, and a little rise beyond it."
"Thank God the light's gone away. He'd hardly see us, anyhow, in the
darkness--and we'll just have to chance being heard. Is the window
too small?"
"Yes. Even if we could cut the bar."
"Well then," said Andrew, gritting his teeth and wishing Sebastian
weighed less. "We'll have to take out the stone."
They spelled each other, all afternoon, at short intervals, the one
who was below listening for the footsteps of the guard. The nail
grew dull--then sharp again as it filed itself against the
stone--then dull once more. Once it almost broke in two and once
they were nearly caught by the unexpected return of the corporal soon
after he had brought them a scant and nasty dinner. It was hard,
exhausting work--the mortar at which they picked was only a little
less indurate than the stones it cemented and the man who worked had
to support himself with one hand against the wall while his human
stepladder suffered rigid agonies in back and loins. When they were
too beaten with fatigue to work any more it seemed to them as if they
had accomplished as little as a pair of caterpillars gnawing blindly
at the sides of an iron box, but at least a beginning had been made.
They disguised their work with a paste of mud and spittle and rested
achingly.
The next day was the same, and the next--a fever of labor in the dark
to the accompaniment of the slight rasp of the worn nail against the
stone--a driving of cramped, rebellious muscles to the same
monotonous, tiny task. Pick, pick, pick, went the sound of the
nail--pick, pick, pick. The sound wore a shallow groove in Andrew's
mind. He could hear it continue interminably through the uneasy veil
of sleep and his fingers twitched mechanically as if they still held
the nail.
Pride and hope alike were gone, the body was gone, of the body only
the hands remained, picking, picking unendingly like clumsy thieves
at the lock of a closed door. He had long ago ceased to be Andrew
Beard. He was a smoke, a shadow, that crawled up upon another
shadow's shoulders in obliterated gloom, to pick, pick, pick with a
shadowy fang at a deepening crack between two blocks of darkness.
Sometimes it was the black, dully-gleaming heart of Night itself at
which he dug, and he half-expected his nail at any moment to slip
through some crack in heaven and shatter itself to bits against the
points of a star.
Why he did what he was doing, he no longer remembered. The thought
of any actual escape was buried deep under tiny crumbs of mortar and
flakes of iron-rust. He felt at times that if some one had opened
the door and told him he was free, he would merely have stared and
grunted and returned to the corner beneath the window to bend his
back again like a burdened ass while Sebastian stood upon it and
nibbled at a coffin of coquina somewhere above him, for ages, with
that slight, rasping sound till his fingers refused their office and
it was time for Andrew to crawl up and nibble in his turn.
Toward mid-evening of the third day, the stone could be loosened a
little. If both had been able to get any purchase on it, at the same
time, they might have been able to wrench it away from the bar which
was cemented into it from above. As it was the stone would only give
one useless and exasperating fraction of an inch, and the problem of
the bar remained. The bar, too, was harder to get at, and they could
hardly file it with what was left of the nail.
"Is it deep sunk, do you think, Sebastian?" said Andrew, lying dead
on the floor after a straining and unsuccessful attempt to tear the
stone out of the wall by main force.
"I think so," said Sebastian wearily. "We shall have to pick the
mortar out of its socket and bend it up somehow. Then, perhaps, the
stone will loosen."
"I wish I had your patience," said Andrew, "Myself, I think we shall
die before we pick out that mortar."
He rose. "Make me a back, Sebastian. I'll see if I can reach it."
He clung with one hand to the sill and reached the other up awkwardly
to pick at the mortar that held the bar. His hand was unsteady with
fatigue and the stroke went wild. The nail slipped, his knuckles
rapped on the stone. His fingers jerked apart mechanically at the
pain, the nail flew out, hopped between the bars and dropped over the
outer edge of the window sill. He heard it clink on a stone and felt
sick and old. He tried to reach over through the bars, but the
window opening was deep and narrow--from his cramped position he
could just put his hand out over the outer edge. There was a ditch
beyond, a couple of feet in depth, where the nail had fallen. Try as
he might he could not reach to the bottom of that ditch.
His muscles gave way. He slid down.
"Kill me, Sebastian," he gasped, "I have lost the nail," and fell in
a heap on the floor.
"We must find another nail," said Sebastian, after a long silence,
but even as he spoke both knew that there was no other nail.
"Perhaps, if we rest for a while, we will be able to move the stone
without it," said Andrew, but his voice was entirely without hope.
The stone had come to have a personality to them both in the hours
they had labored upon it. At times they cursed it in hushed voices
as one curses an ungrateful woman--at other times they pled with it
for a sulky god. Now it had turned into a god forever, a dumb god
with a broad, flat, roughened, eyeless face, that sat across the door
of life like a plummet of lead, and blocked it, and would not move
away.
"We will have to kill the guard after all," said Sebastian,
tonelessly. "Kill him somehow and chance to rest." His voice showed
the utter desperation of the expedient.
"Stone walls do no-ot a pri-son make. Nor i-ron BARS a c-a-a-g-e--"
giggled Andrew suddenly. "That's funny, isn't it, Sebastian? I
remember my mother used to sing that--she had a good voice. But the
man who wrote the song was a liar all the same. Oh, wasn't he a
liar, Sebastian--" he continued, half-hysterically.
"Put me on your shoulders, Andrew," said the other, quietly. "My arm
is a little longer than yours--perhaps I can reach it."
Andrew gulped, recovered his wits, and started to obey. But just as
he bent his back, something rattled on the floor.
They looked at each other incredulously, holding their breath--two
hunched images of shadow staring at each other intently like apes in
a cage. There was another tiny rattle on the floor. Then Andrew
felt a pebble strike on his cheek.
"Window, Sebastian," he said fiercely, while hope grew up in his mind
like a winter-rose.
It seemed to him that he stood for hours with Sebastian's feet
digging into his shoulders while Sebastian whispered hurriedly in
Mahonese to another whisper, swift and gentle as the rustle of a
green leaf on a budded tree. Then at last Sebastian was down and
talking in fierce, little, jerky phrases.
"Caterina," he said, "She managed to get away. There's a sentry but
he's a fool. Sleeps. Oh, you English--you think you can watch a
rathole with a lazy cat. Boat, by the old wharf. Tomorrow night.
They'll think we've gone by land. She'll be at the boat. Your boy
helped. Carlos. He says you gave him a dollar. He's very grateful."
"What about the nail?" said Andrew, still tormented by its loss.
"We have better than nails now," said Sebastian, luxuriously. He
opened his hand and showed Andrew a thin glass bottle full of yellow
liquid. He shook it lovingly. It rattled. "Files," he said
huskily. "Two files. And oil to quiet them."
Andrew began to laugh soundlessly--a painful laughter that racked the
pit of his stomach. Then he thought of something else, and his
laughter stopped.
"What did they do to her?" he said, trembling.
"Caterina? They whipped her, that next morning. That's why she
couldn't come before. Even now--" He stretched out his arms. The
slow roll of his voice filled the chamber like the beating of an iron
heart. "Oh, Christ on the Cross--" he prayed, "Oh, Christ on the
Cross--You have given us a way to the air--Give us vengeance too--if
only a little--a little--" He broke off. "We must rest for a
while," he said more naturally. "Even with the bar cut through we
will need all our strength for the stone."
4.
The bar was all but cut through--the cut plastered over and
concealed. Then they had to wait. They had rested longer than they
had intended before starting the work, sinking down into a black,
murmuring bog of sleep as soon as their heads touched the floor, and
when the task was nearly done, the air beyond the window had changed,
and, behind dark gauzes, yellow dawn began to stir faintly, like a
bird still hidden in the egg. After that, they could sleep again for
a while, but not as they had slept before. They were too tense, the
bog refused to receive them, they napped in uneasy snatches like dogs
before a hunt. Andrew, waking a dozen times, each time glowered up
at the window and was angry to see how slowly the first pale stiletto
of light broadened into a yellow sword.
When the corporal brought their breakfast they were both broad awake
and very restless. They tried to hold him in talk to make the
minutes pass but he was surly and would only mutter in general terms
against sergeants who cheated honest men out of their pay with dice
that had a spell on them.
"By God," he growled, "if both of you weren't such traitors, I'd
change you a bottle of Augustine rum for the promise of a couple of
knucklebones after you were hanged. They say a hanged man's
knucklebones make wizardy dice, if he's strung up in the natural
course of crime--but being traitors, yours wouldn't serve most
likely--'tis just my luck--I never played jailer before except on a
black fellow that stole the Governor's wig for a heathen idol in
Jamaica and he was a poor pagan that didn't leave me as much as a
copper ear-ring. I was born with a caul, too, but I've never had any
luck from it. When I was christened parson opened the book at the
wrong place and started blazing away at the Burial Service most
savagely before a' could be halted and it's shadowed me ever since.
I can feel the Resurrection and the Life stuck in my throat at night
like a slice of apple--You're lucky to be decently hanged, you are,
there's some more grievous and judgmatical death in store for me, and
it rises my dinner in me to have to think of it--" So he mourned
himself away, leaving them alone with a vast desert of time.
The light grew, the hours dragged, they could not keep their eyes
from the bar and the stone. They would talk to each other feverishly
for a while and then, without intention, fall suddenly into a staring
silence. Andrew found at last that he was talking to himself under
breath. "Night," he was murmuring. "Night. Oh _lente, lente,
currite, noctes equi_--" no, that was the wrong quotation, that asked
night's coursers to slacken their pace.
"What time do you suppose it is, Sebastian?" he said for the
twentieth time.
"We must have hours yet," said Sebastian. Andrew had expected the
answer, but he sighed all the same. He looked at the bar again. To
the eyes of both the crack in it had grown, all through the morning.
Now it yawned--a blunt, metal mouth, insecurely stuffed with mud and
straw. It seemed impossible that the stupidest of jailers should not
detect it at a glance.
"Sebastian, do you think if--" began Andrew, and stopped himself. He
must keep his eyes from the bar--if he did not something would make
him leap up and swing from it chattering like a monkey. For a moment
he half-wished the corporal had seen the crack and suspected.
Anything was better than this waiting. Then he made a sort of
formless prayer to anything which might be listening not to pay the
slightest attention to his wish.
There were footsteps in the corridor--coming nearer. Andrew felt his
body grow taut--glancing over at Sebastian he saw that he too was
rigid. His wish had been granted. They were found out. They were
coming to take them to some other cell, deep down, where even a file
would be of no use. They were coming to hang them, now, while the
light still held and the air was sweet.
The door opened. The corporal was there with two other men.
"You're wanted," he said, jerking his thumb at Andrew. "No--not
you--him," as Sebastian started to rise.
Andrew got up slowly, feeling sweat on his palms. Sebastian and he
were to be separated--ironed perhaps. Either step would be fatal to
both, now. Why hadn't they chanced it last night?
"Who wants me?" he said, licking his mouth.
"You're wanted," said the corporal, grinning. "Come on now--shake a
leg."
"_Adios, amigo_," murmured Andrew stiffly as he passed Sebastian.
They touched hands.
"Come on now," said the corporal impatiently, "Last Wills and
Testaments not executed at this shop without longer notice."
5.
"Well, Andrew," said Dr. Gentian, pleasantly, "I am sorry to see you
so unkempt. I wish I could lend you a razor. When I was in prison
at Poona," he continued reflectively, rubbing his chin, "I managed to
shave with a broken cowrie-shell. But it was a painful expedient, at
best. I should not advise its imitation, though it passes the time
as well as trying to tame a rat. I wonder at the patience of those
men who find prison-rats so easy to tame. Mine were savage little
beasts--Orpheus himself could not have made them affable." He broke
off, tracing a little pattern with his right thumb in the silver
scrollwork on the butt of Andrew's pistol.
The two were alone--the soldiers had retired outside the door.
Andrew, through lowered lids calculated the distance between them and
the possibility of springing across the table and getting that firm
throat between his hands before the balanced forefinger could pull
the trigger.
"I wouldn't," said the doctor, smiling. "This priming happens to be
dry and--let me compliment you on your taste in small-arms, Andrew.
You may not have observed it, but this particular pistol is a weapon
of delightful precision. I experimented with it this morning upon a
humming-bird--the poor thing was blown into feathers at twenty paces."
"What do you want with me?" said Andrew, heavily. His eyes were
still blinking with the unaccustomed plenty of daylight in this
windowed room. He had almost forgotten there were such rooms, he
realized, now--and realized too, distastefully, the scarecrow figure
he must cut before the Immaculate Doctor. His clothes were ragged
and foul--dirty stubble covered his face--he had not been clean for
days. His eyes were furtive--his body had a prison smell to it--when
he walked, he walked like a prisoner, with a heavy, shuffling step.
In a tale, such tiny things would not matter to the heroic
captive--it was monstrously unfair that they should matter now.
"I wanted to see you, Andrew," said the Doctor, softly, "and now that
I have, I confess myself satisfied."
Andrew hardly heard him--his mind was busy with a different problem.
"For God's sake tell them to give me a clean shirt, you devil!" he
burst out suddenly, and instantly felt ashamed.